Asia News

Vietnam leads mobile e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia

Vietnam is the fastest-growing market in South East Asia in terms of mobile e-commerce growth, says the latest report on Southeast Asia’s 2017 e-commerce status by iPrice.

In the past 12 months, mobile phone usage in Vietnam has grown on an average of 19 percent, accounting for 72 percent of the overall e-commerce Web traffic. In comparison to other Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam enjoyed the steepest growth at 26 percent.

However, in absolute terms, Indonesia is leading mobile e-commerce, with 87 percent of the traffic coming from mobile phones.

Meanwhile, traffic via personal computers is less than 30 percent in all countries in the region.

Vietnam is also the leader in website conversion rate, which measures the percentage of website visitors that turn into customers, with a conversion rate of up to 65 percent, closely followed by Singapore and Indonesia.

Meanwhile, with the low use of credit cards (except in Singapore), e-commerce merchants are offering more payment options to reach out to shoppers.

In Vietnam, 86 percent of merchants offer online payment, while cash on delivery is offered by more than 80 per cent of the players. Besides this, in both Vietnam and Thailand, almost 50 percent of the merchants offer offline point of sales.

This is due to the popularity of online to offline e-commerce models, such as The gioi di dong (Vietnam Mobile World), FPT Shop and Nguyen Kim, the report said.

However, due to lower gross domestic product per capital (6,880 USD) compared to other countries in the region, Vietnam has the lowest basket size, with an average order value of just 23 USD.

iPrice’s data was collected from over 1,000 e-commerce players operating in the six largest Southeast Asian markets, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.